Thursday, June 09, 2011

Household Net Worth Increases $10T in 2 Years

The Federal Reserve released data today on household balance sheets, and reported that household net worth increased to slightly more than $58 trillion in the first quarter of 2011, the highest level since the second quarter of 2008, almost three year ago (see chart above). From the recession-driven low of $47.75 trillion in the first quarter of 2009, household net worth has experienced a V-shaped recovery of more than $10 trillion in just two years. Without adjusting for inflation or population, the net worth of U.S. households has increased by 45% since 2002, and has doubled in the 15 years since 1996. And in the twenty years since the early 1990s, the net worth of American households has almost tripled, having gained almost $40 trillion of wealth in just several decades.

Bottom Line: It took more than several hundred years until 1996 to create $30 trillion of wealth for U.S. households, and then that much wealth ($30 trillion) was created again over just the last 15 years. And despite the Great Recession, a severe financial crisis, and a collapse of housing prices, more than $10 trillion of wealth has been created over the last two years - that's a testament to the resiliency and dynamism of the market.

Robert Shiller, the economist who co- founded the S&P/Case-Shiller index of U.S. home prices, said a further decline in property values of 10 percent to 25 percent in the next five years “wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

“There’s no precedent for this statistically, so no way to predict,” Shiller said today at a conference hosted by Standard & Poor’s in New York...